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Biography
John Jackson is Emeritus Professor of Comparative Criminal Law & Procedure at the University of Nottingham, a qualified barrister and a Parole Commissioner and a Sentence Review Commissioner in Northern Ireland. He was previously Professor of Comparative Criminal Law & Procedure at the University of Nottingham from 2012-2023, Dean of the School of Law at University College Dublin (2008-2011) and Professor of Public Law at Queen's University Belfast (1995 - 2008). He has held visiting professorships at Hastings College of the Law, University of California and the University of New South Wales. He has been a Fernand Braudel Senior Fellow at the European University Institute and is presently a temporary lecturer at the Faculty of Law, Université de Lille.
Expertise Summary
John Jackson has written numerous books and articles in the areas of domestic, comparative and international criminal procedure and evidence, including (with Barry Hancock), Standards for Prosecutions: An Analysis of the National Prosecuting Agencies in the United Kingdom (IAP, 2006) and Standards for Prosecutions: Ireland, New South Wales, The Netherlands and Denmark (IAP, 2008); (with Sarah Summers) The Internationalisation of Criminal Evidence (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and Obstacles to Fairness in Criminal Proceedings: Individual Rights and Institutional Forms Hart, 2018). His latest book is Special Advocates in the Adversarial System (Routledge, 2020).
John has led several large-scale empirical projects on criminal justice, including the Nuffield-funded first ever ground-breaking research on witnesses, defendants and jurors' perceptions of the criminal courts in Northern Ireland, a pioneering Leverhulme Trust funded project on the Diplock courts in Northern Ireland comparing judicial intervention and trial conduct in jury and non-jury trials (see J Jackson and S Doran, Judge without Jury: Diplock Trials in the Adversary System (OUP, 1995), the first ever Irish Court Service-funded empirical survey on the jurisdiction of the Irish courts (see J Jackson and S Doran, A Study of the Jurisidction of the Criminal Courts in Ireland (Court Service, 2003), and, most recently, a major inter-jurisdictional study on the cross-examination of vulnerable witnesses in criminal trials funded by the Nuffield Foundation (see J Jackson, J Doak, C Saunders, D Wright and D Cooper, Mapping the Changing Face of Cross-Examination in Criminal Trials (Nuffield Foundation, 2024).
John has also played an active role in law reform. He was independent assessor on the Criminal Justice Review Group established as part of the Good Friday Agreement (1998-2000), an expert on the International Criminal Procedure Expert Framework funded by The Hague Institute for the Internationalisation of Law (2008- 2012), a member of the Advisory Panel to the Gillen Review into the law and procedures in serious sexual offences in Northern Ireland and a research consultant with Paul Mageean to the High Level Working Group on the Role of An Garda Síochána (AGS) in the Irish Public Prosecution System (2020-2021). He was also a member of the European Law Institute project on the Admissibility of E-Evidence in Criminal Proceedings in the European Union (2020-2023).